All the best moments are usually accidental. No writer or director can force 'em. The two times I was on-set and involved in the editing of films based off my scripts taught me that.

I guess as writers (and directors), we are just glorified matre'd's. The best we can hope for is to bring all the elements to the table.

Jeff, be sure to read the NY Times feature on Mike Nichols that will post here at 2PM EDT. It speaks directly to your point.

Inspired by today's posts (and a slight stretch of boredom... my kids are with their grandmother so as a stay-at-home dad, I'm currently useless...) I did a little Graduate-based web crawling.

This film had a MASSIVE impact on me when I first saw it, as it obviously did to many. My first contact with it was at a perfect time in my life... freshman in college, dating women and failing miserably, the usual growing pains.

I sought out the book it was based upon and was amazed to discover how VERBATIM Nichols' film (and Henry's screenplay) was to Charles Webb's text!

Here's Wikipedia's entry on author Charles Webb:

"Webb grew up in affluent Pasadena, California. He attended Midland School in Los Olivos, California and graduated from Williams College in 1961. He declined an inheritance from his father, a wealthy doctor [1].

Webb lived for several years in Hastings-on-Hudson. His wife was notorious for greeting people at the door stark naked.

As of 2006, Webb has been with his long-term partner Eve for more than 40 years. Eve shaves her head and calls herself "Fred" in solidarity with a Californian support group called Fred, for men who have low self-esteem [2]. Fred is an artist and her work includes illustrations for Webb's 2002 novel New Cardiff. The couple have two sons, one of whom is now a performance artist who once cooked and ate a copy of The Graduate with cranberry sauce [3].

The Webbs removed their children from school so that they could tutor them at home. This was an illegal act in California at the time, and to evade the authorities they fled the state; at one point they managed a nudist camp in New Jersey. They also divorced - accounts vary as to why (it was not due to personal differences), either in protest against the institution of marriage [4] or against the US's lack of marriage rights for gays [5]. They sold their wedding presents back to their guests and having given away four houses in succession lived on the breadline, taking menial jobs as cleaners, cooks and fruit-pickers, working at K-Mart and living in a shack [6]. They currently live in Hove, East Sussex."

My suspicions are that Webb himself wrote that! :D

Additionally, Wiki reports that he actually wrote a sequel entitled HOME SCHOOL. Indeed, check Amazon dot com and in fact, it is available in hardcover, came out back in January!

I wonder how it tastes with cranberry sauce?

Jeff, that's great stuff! Thanks for doing that research. I'm going to promote that info to the main post.